He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of Hersey Bradford Goodwin and Lucrettia Watson.

[2] As a teacher he did much to raise the tone of classical reading from that of a mechanical exercise to literary study.

But his most important work was his Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (1860), of which the seventh revised edition appeared in 1877 and another (enlarged) in 1890.

This was "based in part on Madvig and Krüger," but, besides making accessible to American students the works of these continental grammarians, it presented original matter, including a "radical innovation in the classification of conditional sentences," notably the "distinction between particular and general suppositions.

[2] Goodwin also wrote a few elaborate syntactical studies, to be found in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, the twelfth volume of which was dedicated to him upon the completion of fifty years as an alumnus of Harvard and forty-one years as Eliot professor.